When Red Hot Chili Peppers released Californication in 1999, they’d already been together for 16 years. It was with that album, however, that the LA funk-rockers found a formula that truly worked. Mostly ditching their upbeat and irascible funk-rap, they’d hit upon a gentler, more melancholy.
It’s a formula they barely deviated from with the two albums that followed – 2002’s By The Way and 2006’s epic Stadium Arcadium – both of which sealed RHCP’s status as one of the biggest bands in the world. Since then, mainstay guitarist John Frusciante, whose guitar lines helped define the Chili Peppers’ latterday sound, has left, being replaced by former ally Josh Klinghoffer in 2009.
This is the first album the band have recorded with him. With lead single The Adventures Of Rain Dance Maggie, the plaintive sorrow of Police Station and the pathos-fuelled Brendan’s Death Song, Klinghoffer asserts his identity within the group, while also retaining their by-now trademark sound. The 80s-esque Paul Simon tribal rhythms of Ethiopia and jaunty, almost twee Happiness Loves Company fare less well and feel out of place. On the whole, however, this is an album that furthers, rather than relies on, the legacy of its creators.
